Dalya Alberge
Sun 1 Oct 2023
County Highway is designed to look like a 19th-century newspaper.
In a digital age of 24-hour rolling news, newspapers worldwide are investing resources in their online editions. But a US publisher has gone back in time by launching a print-only broadsheet in the style of a 19th-century newspaper.
Called County Highway, it is responding to a demand from readers for in-depth stories and writing that needs time to savour. It will not have an internet edition.
Focusing primarily on the US and publishing every two months, it has a format partly inspired by Charles Dickens and other 19th-century authors whose stories were serialised in journals. It will include serialised books from its own new publishing house – an independent company that is taking on the conglomerates that dominate the industry.
“People read differently on the printed page than they do on a screen,” said the newspaper’s editor, David Samuels. “The printed page is an immersive experience without constant distractions or the spectre of other people’s responses on social media. It’s a much more enriching and human experience.”
An editor’s note co-written with Walter Kirn, the newspaper’s editor-at-large, observes: “Some of our articles are funny, and others are written by people who are seriously pissed off or who believe that the world is coming to an end.”
It adds: “We hope to advance the same relationship to America that Bob Dylan had when he wrote his versions of folk songs … We have the same relationship to our subjects that Mark Twain and William Faulkner and Ralph Ellison and Tom Wolfe had when they wrote about America and Americans.
‘We hope to advance the same relationship to America that Bob Dylan had when he wrote his versions of folk songs,’ the editor writes.
“We are deeply and personally bored to death of hyperbolic chatter about politics, gadgets and the semiotics of Taylor Swift from people who know nothing and come from nowhere.”
The newspaper’s potential has been recognised by book and record shops across the US and Canada, which are displaying it prominently. It costs $8.50 (£7); the first issue launched in the summer with no advertising, but through word of mouth its 25,000 copies sold out.
Samuels said: “The response has been tremendous. We hit our year-three subscription and sales targets in the first three weeks of putting out our first issue.”
Its publisher is Donald Rosenfeld, former president of Merchant Ivory, who produced period film classics such as Howards End, starring Emma Thompson. He told the Observer that there was a demand for in-depth articles: “I think we’re bringing water to the desert. It’s an overnight success.
“Someone called from a large corporation and said: ‘I want to buy 1,000 subscriptions to give to my workers. Rather than [them] doing their Instagram pages and Facebook, I’m going to tell them: ‘Read something that’s actually elevating.’”
Rosenfeld spoke of commissioning the best writers to write on anything about which they feel passionate: “It’s what the New Yorker used to be, or the old Atlantic, before they all became so of-the-moment topical. What it really was about was interesting writing – for example, the Pulitzer prize-winning master of nonfiction John McPhee writing about oranges. They’re stories that we wouldn’t read otherwise and that are beautifully crafted. They cross human interest.”
The next issue is published this week, with features ranging in subject from UFOs to a festival celebrating mules.
Publisher Donald Rosenfeld is the former president of the film producers Merchant Ivory.
In a similar move, their independent publishing company, Pan American Books, will focus on books that the conglomerates tend to ignore.
Unusually, the new company will also share the sales proceeds 50-50 with its authors. Rosenfeld said: “Our idea is an absolute partnership with authors, who would normally receive a low advance and a minor percentage of profits.”
Just like the newspaper, the books will not be available online or on tape. “We’re only going to do books that you can hold,” Rosenfeld said.
